After this month’s attacks in Paris, it didn’t take French authorities long to determine that the suicide bomber whose body was found outside a soccer stadium had only posed as a Syrian refugee in order to get into Europe. The numbers on his Syrian passport weren’t legitimate, and the picture on it didn’t match the name. We don’t know who he was or where his travels started; we only know that he sailed through a police checkpoint in Greece, and that he was not a Syrian refugee.

As for the rest of the attackers, a top European Union official said last week that they’d all been identified as EU citizens — mostly French and Belgian nationals — meaning they could have entered the US without even obtaining visas.

But none of these revelations have slowed the fetid stream of nativism and Islamophobia from reaching the United States.